Oh dear

Please don't try and argue otherwise, as good as Australia were, NZ were equally as bad. They were a poor relative of the side that turned up snarling at England the week before. If you don't think your boys were completely broken, then they must have completely lost their bottle on the big occasion!!!

Seriously, you need to get your opinions somewhere other than the New Zealand sports pages.

And I've already addressed that by saying they can't, he's the best forward at Souths and one of the best in the league. To easily replace him you need Souths full pack to be better than him.

Why is it that great RL players always become average or worse once they switch to another code......I have never experienced insecurity to equal that of your average RL fan and Aussies are the worst!





New Zealand were utterly "shot" after the semi-final. Australia were always going to win the RLWC easily if they beat England in the opener. Dotting Fiji in a semi-final was perfect preparation for meeting a tired pack the following week.

Their a different level tbh.

Souths silence and the stories that are getting leaked out in the press are annoying. I'm tempted not to bother making the long trip every two weeks, i won't bother at all if they sign Blake Ferguson, I might just pick the top city games of the round.

How could Souths fit Blake Ferguson in under the salary cap? Anyway aren't London Broncos chasing Blake?

Blake probably can't play in the NRL this year because of his "catch a snatch" conviction. However he has proven himself very sociable and will be the ideal Super League centre under the superb coaching of New Age guru Tony Rea.

Ferguson won't be back in the NRL for a very long time, if ever. he also will not get a UK visa with a sexual assault conviction. Blake is heading for the building site if he is lucky.

If Sam leaves I can guarantee Souths will still finish top 4, NRL will still get the same viewing and attendance figures, the billion $ media deal will still be there and the telegraph will still fill pages slagging RL off. The days of a player being bigger than the game are long long gone, I hope he doesn't go as i enjoy watching him play but if he does my enjoyment of watching the NRL and seeing Souths choke will not be diminished in any way.

Nobody said any different, well apart from Souths been top 4, the point was like Falou, Hunt, Rogers, Salior, Tuquri, Willams and Thorn, off the top of my head, their abilities will be/were missed and the comp is of lesser standard because of it.

I disagree, apart from the clubs that lost them where the loss of one of your top players does have an impact, the game itself hardly notices. Even outstanding players have a short peak where they are indisputably the very best, 2 or 3 years, so the passage of time itself will do the job of the yawnion dollars. The next superstar is always waiting to be discovered.

Keeping the game itself watchable and entertaining is a far more important issue for its future. Its sad on individual level that good players are wasting their talents in yawnion but no more than that. You can't polish a turd and the world's finest athletes couldn't make the 6 nations watchable.

But that's my point.

When you say the next superstar is waiting to be discovered would you rather they play with other superstars are bang average players?

Union might be boring to us but more people watch and play it in the world than League.

Logically that makes sense, but the evidence on the ground says otherwise. Six nations crowds tell you that.

For what it's worth, I think it's because the sports fan is attracted to tension at least as much as they are to athletic spectacle. Add a load of other factors to the list too, social occasion, prawn sandwiches, whatever, but people like tense games.

TBH, for all its sins (and I struggle to watch it), Union's scrappiness, slowness, and the high value of penalties, seems to make for reasonably close games a lot of the time, (or with the result often not nailed on for at least for 50 or 60 minutes). I presume a lot of people who enjoy it do so for this reason.

When RL games are good AND close, they can be superb ( e.g. the Eng-NZ semi-final) in a way that I don't think Union can ever match.

Don't underestimate the attraction of sporting tension over the sporting spectacle. Darts anyone?

They know how to put an event on. Unless we learn how to we'll keep falling behind in Europe.